Monday, January 12, 2009

"I Felt Like I Was In A War": Pro-Hamas Violence Plagues France

What kind of "peace movement" is this?

There's been a series of disturbing attacks on the Synagogues of France, as vandals are no longer satisfied with scrawling vulgar anti-semitic graffitti, they are graduating now to attempted arson. Here are a trio of cases, loosely translated from French media sources. First, from Strasburg and Paris:

Molotov cocktails were thrown against a private home serving as a religious gathering place for the Jewish community in Schiltigheim, Bas-Rhin, a suburb of Strasburg.

Two molotov cocktails were also thrown against a synagogue in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The window of a Jewish restaurant was broken and the wall damaged by the beginning of a fire.

A burning car was rammed into the front of a Toulouse suburb synagogue last Monday night. A second car with three molotov cocktails inside was then rammed into the first car, but did not catch on fire.

A rabbi was conducting a class within the synagogue when the attack took place.

Neighbors gave the alarm, and investigators hypothesize that this quick-thinking action kept the would-be arsonists from completing their intended plans.

Even smaller French cities are not being spared from the violence accompanying the pro-Hamas "peace" movement. For instance, the southern coastal city of Perpignan; who would have imagined such a scenic place would ever see the kind of stone throwing and feral rage attributed more commonly to dangerous suburbs such as Seine-Saint-Denis? The local newspaper L'Indépendant chronicles the emotional as well as financial toll that the thugs' behavior takes on the civilized residents of the community..:

A store was attacked while the owner, his wife and two daughters, aged 6 and 10, were still inside, at work. The little girls are still traumatized by the fury of the assault. A translation of an interview conducted with their mother, in the aftermath of their nightmare:

"Why?... I felt like I was in a war! I didn't sleep at all last night, I worried that they would [return and] set fire to the store. They threatened us", she says while slipping her finger across her throat.

Others shops were attacked as well, but most were closed, and a few were so well fortified against vandalism that damage tended to be minor. Many merchants in the neighborhood where the "peace" protest took place, chose to close their doors that Saturday, prefering to lose a busy day's sales rather than go through the kind of terror that the family quoted above had to endure. Some of these entrepreneurs found that they were forced to stay closed a second day, in order to repair the damage done in their absence by the anti-Israel protestors. There was apparently no police presence in the neighborhood adjacent to the "peace" protest, accounting for the scale of vandalism; the forces of law and order only arriving on scene after the attacks started taking place up and down the street. The report concludes by underscoring the stress that shopkeepers will undergo at the annoucement of any future "peace" protests downtown.

Where is this all going? Are even those who haven't forgotten their European history, being condemned to repeat it?